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Table 1.
Early taxonomic practice relied on an intellectual framework that was largely intact since the time of the ancient Greeks. Real, existing creatures, human or otherwise, were considered to be deviants or degenerates from an ideal form, whose true nature was perfect, transcendent, and otherworldly. As applied to people, this involved specifying features that were not necessarily accurate descriptors, but rather represented the underlying form or essence of which real people were simply imperfect embodiments. Thus, the Swedish botanistphysician Carl (Carolus) Linnaeus (1707–1778) could formally define the European subspecies as having long, flowing blond hair and blue eyes, regardless of the fact that most of them did not actually possess these characteristics. His purpose was to describe the idealized form that underlay the observable variation. Likewise, his descriptions of Africans as lazy or Asians as greedy was intended to be a statement of their basic natures, not necessarily an empirically based generalization. Clearly Linnaeus was inscribing popular or folk prejudices upon the continental groups he was formally defining. To some extent he recognized this, as he grouped the Lapps, or Saami, within the European subspecies; he consciously strove to romanticize the Saami, even as they were commonly ‘‘othered’’ in both popular and scholarly minds. Human taxonomy thus served to formalize social ideologies about sameness and difference. By the end of the eighteenth century, German zoologist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had jettisoned the personality and cultural traits used by Linnaeus in favor of only physical traits. However, he also modified the Linnaean system by ranking, rather than simply listing, the races (Gould 1998). Moreover, scholars at this time began to apply the previously informal term ‘‘race’’ to the formal Linnaean subspecies. The result was a parallel
Table 2.
usage of the term, in which groups of people, diversely constituted, could be called ‘‘races,’’ and their essences could be defined in accordance with whatever they were taken to be. Concurrently, the natures of large continental ‘‘races’’ could stand as formal taxonomic entities. Thus, races could exist within races, or they could crosscut other races. Because the attributes of the Irish, Italians, or Jews were Platonic essences taken to be inscribed in the very cores of the people in question—by virtue of simply being born into the group—it did not much matter what an individual representative looked like or acted like. These were not so much group-level generalizations, which have always existed as folk taxonomies, but group-level scientific definitions, which were something new. THE ORIGINS OF RACES
A French scholar named Isaac de la Peyre`re published a controversial hypothesis in 1655. He suggested that certain biblical passages were consistent with multiple divine creations of people, of which the story related in Genesis was only one. These ‘‘Pre-Adamites’’ were the progenitors of the most divergent forms of people, who might thereby be considered to be different in both nature and origin, as they were the product of different creative acts by God. La Peyre`re was subsequently invoked as the founder of a school called polygenism, which gained popularity in the nineteenth century as American scholars increasingly sought to justify the practice of slavery by recourse to science (although that had not been La Peyre`re’s intent). As the slavery debate crystallized in America and Europe, the scientific issues centered on whether races had a single origin (monogenism) or separate origins (polygenism). Monogenists tended to invoke a literal reading of the Book of Genesis in support of abolitionist politics, which also necessitated the development of explanations for the emergence of human physical diversity since the time of Adam and Eve. They thus tended to be biblical ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM
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Scientific Racism, History of
literalists, social liberals, and early evolutionists, a fusion of ideologies that may seem incongruous from a modern standpoint. Polygenists rejected biblical literalism in favor of textual interpretation, yet they held to a strictly creationist view of human origins in which people are as they always have been. This view was used to support the oppression of presumably inferior peoples.
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A. believed they were uncivilized and biologically inferior. :)
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